If one were to ask the average leftist (as opposed to the few who occasionally read something) who shot Trayvon Martin in 2012, their answer would probably be something along the lines of “a white cop.” In fact, many who are not dedicated lefties might return the same answer, so thorough was the press at proffering that narrative.

The truth is that George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin, is a self-identified Latino who looks about as much like a white guy as I do. Neither was Zimmerman a police officer; he was a neighborhood watch coordinator with a concealed-carry permit.

I was singularly horrified at the time that the fake news campaign (before the term “fake news” was even coined) depicting Zimmerman as some sort of blond Asgardian prowling the neighborhood with his war-hammer and looking for black children to smash was not only as brazen as it was, but that it got sufficient traction to effectively transform Zimmerman into a white cop in the eyes of so many.

Thus, it should be no surprise that I find the current media firestorm over the Covington Catholic High School students who have been targeted by the left over alleged racist behavior after a tense encounter with a Native American activist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last week almost passé. Sure, the students from the Kentucky high school behaved impeccably and did nothing any casual observer would find untoward – but none of that matters. They were white (well, most of them were), and some were wearing “Make America Great Again” swag, so they must have committed some subtle hate crime. If not, they surely intended to.

So the positively Orwellian coverage of this non-story is nothing at all new. Since Barack Obama publicly charged that the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “acted stupidly” when they arrested his pal Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009, the left and the establishment press have attempted to foment racial tension at every opportunity. Bereft of a viable opportunity, they’ve shown that they’re quite capable of making up stories out of whole cloth. Even with the benign intent of the Covington students having become apparent, the left continues to try new ways to affix the racist label onto the young men. President Donald Trump’s defense of the students, while appropriate, has of course only fanned the flames of the left’s ire.

As has become typical following one of these racially charged incidents, prominent leftists came out of the woodwork, spouting their boilerplate foul invective against the students. One of those who weighed in was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. She is one of two freshman Muslim congresswomen who’ve been roundly disparaging America, the president and his policies since the midterm election. Apparently, Omar overstepped and is now facing harsh criticism for going after the Covington students on a social media venue.

Back in the days when President Obama was regularly hosting Islamists at the White House and then scrubbing the visitor logs, many of us began to engage in discussions of why Islam and those on the far left seemed to be hitting it off so well, particularly since some of the identity groups under the umbrella of the left (women and gays in particular) don’t fare at all well in Islamic societies.

Some said it was simple: Both have the common goal of dismantling the representative republican model of government in America.

While this is certainly true, I think the affinity runs a bit deeper.

I’ve made no bones about the fact that my charity and tolerance with respect to Islam are extremely limited. Islam and the model of Western society are wholly incompatible, and anyone who argues otherwise is either deluding themselves, or they are attempting to delude others. I do not believe that Muslims should be allowed to hold office in America. I do not believe that there are “peaceful” Muslims, unless one counts those who would give their militant brethren sway but prefer not to take up the sword themselves. Nowhere in the 1,400-year history of this creed do we see evidence of Muslims playing well with others in the long term.

Nor do I believe that Islam ought to be venerated simply because it is old, or because it claims to be an Abrahamic religion, like Judaism or Christianity. Islam is not a religion; it is a social system with a religious component.

Similarly, leftism in the West is very much akin to a social system with a religious component. Like Islam, leftism has stringent social controls – on thought and speech, for example. We can see this quite clearly in the doctrine vociferously espoused by the left. To run afoul of these results in swift and terrible retribution from leftists at large. As in the Islamic world, this retribution can even encompass corporal punishment.

In the Islamic world, Islam is the State, and the State is Islamic. This is very much the case with the left – or at least, how those on the left would like to see things shake out in that religion is to be supplanted with socialism (the “religion” of the State). Leftism even has its own pantheon of deities, if you will, in the special interests its devotees venerate: the environment and the various identity groups leftists ostensibly defend being among these.

Once could expound upon these similarities more deeply, and they would become more numerous and eerie with the telling. The most significant one is this: In the end, both Islam and leftism (socialism) are incompatible with our system of governance. Both find themselves at odds with the Bill of Rights on a regular basis, and ironically, both have found a platform for their subversive poison due to dangerous but commonly accepted misinterpretations thereof.